Lucrezia Borgia

Italian noblewoman

• Born: April 18, 1480
• Birthplace: Subiaco, Papal States (now in Italy)
• Died: June 24, 1519
• Place of death: Ferrara, Papal States (now in Italy)

Lucrezia Borgia, a patron of scholars and artists but also a pawn in her family’s dynastic ambitions, was celebrated for her beauty and wit, immortalized in opera and melodrama, and reviled as the epitome of Renaissance immorality. She might best be seen as embodying the straitened circumstances of aristocratic women in Italian Renaissance society.

Early Life

Lucrezia Borgia (lew-KREHT-syah BAWR-jah) was the daughter of the powerful Cardinal Rodrigo Borja (later Borgia), who became Pope Alexander VI in 1492. Her mother, the Roman noblewoman Vannozza Cattanei, was Rodrigo’s favorite mistress, and Vannozza’s children always enjoyed special favor with their father.

Lucrezia was raised in the house of a kinswoman, Adriana de Mila. Adriana provided young Lucrezia with the education her social station demanded, with a heavy emphasis on courtly manners and etiquette. By the time she reached her early teens, Lucrezia was fluent in Spanish, Italian, and French, with a refinement and sophistication suited to any of the great Renaissance courts. Soon after her father’s election as Pope Alexander VI, she began to spend more and more time at the papal court, where her beauty and elegance established her as a leading figure on the Roman social scene.

Enemies of the Borgias later portrayed Lucrezia’s youth as a time of exceptional depravity; some went so far as to accuse her of incest with her father and her brothers, Juan and Cesare. One of the most damning accounts of Lucrezia’s early life is found in the Diarium sive rerum urbanarum commentarii (1503) of Pope Alexander’s master of ceremonies, Johannes Burchard, who placed Lucrezia at the very heart of an often scandalously extravagant court. Even so well placed a source as Burchard, however, must be regarded with some skepticism; he was hardly sympathetic to Alexander’s papacy, and he seems to have gone to considerable lengths to discredit the Borgias.

Life’s Work

Lucrezia Borgia was a woman of exceptional ability. When she was still in her teens, her father had no qualms about leaving her in charge of his affairs in Rome while he was away from the city. In her later years, she often governed Ferrara during the absences of her husband, Duke Alfonso I d’Este.

Nevertheless, throughout her life, her considerable talents were valued less than her usefulness in securing strategic marriages for the continued advancement of her family. First as cardinal and later as pope, her father worked to establish the Borgias in the front ranks of the great Italian dynasties. To this end, Lucrezia was intended from earliest childhood for an important and diplomatically beneficial marriage.

Before her eleventh birthday, she was already twice betrothed (though both engagements were subsequently terminated). At just thirteen, she married Giovanni Sforza, a nephew of the wily duke of Milan, Ludovico Sforza. The union, negotiated chiefly through the offices of Ludovico’s brother, Cardinal Ascanio Sforza, aimed at providing the pope with a powerful ally in the face of potential threats from both King Ferdinand II of Naples and Charles VIII of France. The marriage was in every respect a failure. The Milanese alliance proved less valuable than the pope had hoped. Moreover, Lucrezia found little to her liking in Giovanni, a dull and rather stupid man nearly fifteen years her senior. The pope had the marriage annulled in 1497, claiming (in the face of vehement denials from Giovanni) that it had never been consummated.

With her divorce pending and amid rumors of an illicit pregnancy (the existence of which remains an object of debate), Lucrezia sought to flee from unwanted scrutiny by retiring to the Roman convent of San Sisto. It is possible that she contemplated a monastic vocation at the time, though her father and brother had other plans for her. In 1498, Lucrezia was called out of the convent to marry Duke Alfonso of Bisceglie, a nephew of King Federico of Naples. It was hoped that the marriage might accelerate a thaw in relations between Naples and the Papacy. It was by all accounts a far happier union than Lucrezia’s first, but when it failed to pave the way to a marriage between Cesare and one of Federico’s daughters, Cesare forged an alliance with King Louis XII of France and Lucrezia’s marriage to Alfonso became a political liability.

In July of 1500, Alfonso barely survived an assassination attempt, only to perish in a second attack a month later. There was no doubt as to the identity of the conspirators: Alfonso’s assassin, Michelotto Coreglia, was one of Cesare’s most feared henchmen. Barely twenty years of age and pregnant, Lucrezia found herself a widow.

Alfonso’s murder devastated Lucrezia. She remained true, however, to the family cause indeed, she christened Alfonso’s posthumous son Rodrigo, after her father and, in 1501, she entered into her third (and final) marriage, this time to Alfonso I d’Este from the ruling house of Ferrara. Alfonso’s father, Duke Ercole I d’Este, was at first apprehensive of a union with Lucrezia but soon discovered that her evil reputation was wholly unwarranted. In fact, d’Este remained devoted to Lucrezia even after her father’s death and Cesare’s ruin deprived her of all political value in 1503.

Unlike her brother Cesare, who demonstrated little interest in the arts or scholarship, Lucrezia became a great patron of Renaissance culture, presiding at Ferrara over a court of exceptional brilliance. Among her friends and protégés she numbered the writer Ludovico Ariosto and Pietro Bembo, a Humanist poet and cardinal with whom she formed a powerful friendship and entered into a remarkable correspondence. She distinguished herself as an especially generous patron of charities and ecclesiastical foundations; her death in childbirth at the age of thirty-nine occasioned great grief in Ferrara.

Significance

Lucrezia remains one of those unfortunate historical figures for whom a fair-minded historical assessment is rendered almost impossible by the weight of a persistently and overwhelmingly hostile tradition. The scandals and sexual license ascribed to her youth seem to have little basis in fact. The piety of her later years need not derive, as is often asserted, from some radical break with a grossly immoral past. Even the most intimate and suggestive of her letters to Bembo reveal a woman with a delicately, almost naively romantic, sensibility, wholly unlike the lascivious siren denounced by her critics.

Lucrezia was exceptionally close to her father and brothers, but accusations of incest are entirely without merit. Indeed, that charge seems to have originated with her embittered first husband, Giovanni Sforza. Her depiction as a murderous seductress, poisoning one unfortunate husband after another, is absurd; not a single murder can be laid in her lap.

In the final judgment, Lucrezia’s life provides a window into the lives of wealthy, high-born women during the Renaissance. Even with her great abilities, Lucrezia had few options beyond the politics of the bridal bed. Her retreat to San Sisto in 1497 to the considerable consternation of her father was a momentary assertion of independence, and the murder of Alfonso of Bisceglie in 1500 placed serious strains on her relationship with her father and Cesare.

In the end, though, she had little choice but to continue in the service of her family’s dynastic interests. Indeed, only after she ceased to have any real value as a dynastic bargaining chip could she mature into the great Renaissance patron of scholars and charities that she became at Ferrara, where she was long and fondly remembered as la buona duchessa (the good duchess).

Bibliography

Bellonci, Maria. The Life and Times of Lucrezia Borgia. Translated by Bernard and Barbara Wall. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1953. This classic Italian biography was among the first major studies to reject the conventional portrait of Lucrezia as a murderous seductress.

Burchard, Johann. At the Court of the Borgia. Edited and translated by Geoffrey Parker. London: Folio Society, 1963. An excellent edition and translation, with scholarly commentary, of Johannes Burchard’s fascinating (if sometimes deliberately misleading) contemporary account of life at the court of Alexander VI.

Corvo, Frederick Baron. A History of the Borgias. New York: Modern Library, 1931. Written by an author every bit as colorful as his subjects, this elegant, overwrought, and hugely entertaining book revels in the more lurid aspects of the Borgia legacy. Despite its erudition and thorough research, this one should probably be read more as entertainment than as a work of scholarship.

Erlanger, Rachel. Lucrezia Borgia: A Biography. New York: Hawthorn Books, 1978. Though less impressive than Bellonci’s treatment, this is an eminently readable biography treating Lucrezia as a hapless pawn in the dynastic program of her father and brother.

Gregorovius, Ferdinand. Lucrezia Borgia: A Chapter from the Morals of the Italian Renaissance. Translated by John Leslie Garner. New York: Phaidon, 1948. Written by the great nineteenth century German historian of medieval and Renaissance Rome, this meticulous and detailed study embodies the moralizing tone that has so long characterized treatments of Lucrezia’s life and significance.

Johnson, Marion, and Georgina Masson. The Borgias. New York: Penguin Books, 2002. Originally published in 1981, this lively, readable, and relatively brief work is an important contribution to the ongoing rehabilitation of the Borgia reputation.

Mallett, Michael E. The Borgias: The Rise and Fall of a Renaissance Dynasty. New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 1969. One of the best English-language studies of the dynasty, Mallett’s work examines the Borgia family fortunes in the context of the ever-shifting political circumstances of Renaissance Italy.